![]() Navigating the political waters proved tricky. While the Army Corps did not require local approval to move forward, it generally prefers to do so. There was an extended period of review, analysis, and inter-town squabbling well before the Army Corps announced it would move forward with the bedeviled project in April 2014.Įarly on, the Army Corps sought to engage the main pond stakeholders, the towns of Aquinnah and Chilmark, and the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah). ![]() Sterns estimated the project has so far provided more than 15,000 cubic feet of high-quality sand for Lobsterville Beach, of which half, he estimated, has been lost to winter storms. “The core samples were fantastic, but it’s even better than we hoped.” “This is really high-quality sand,” Bret Stearns, director of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) natural resources department, told The Times. Menemsha Channel was first dredged by the Army Corps in 1950.īenefits from the dredge project benefit are twofold - it removes sand that has accreted in Menemsha Channel since the ’70s, the last time the channel was dredged, and it uses that sand to nourish an eroding stretch of Lobsterville Beach, by pumping it over roughly two miles of pipeline. In 1945, the federal government designated Menemsha Pond a “harbor of refuge,” and boats must be able to seek shelter there in the event of a major storm. The Army Corps of Engineers, which is funding the $2.2 million project from a $50 billion Hurricane Sandy relief fund, determined the channel is a navigational hazard - parts of the channel shoaled to less than three feet.
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